The great weepy trifecta: dead dog, depression, and PMS…oh wait, it’s a quadfecta (is that even a word? yes, apparently it is, but…I do not think it means what you think it means)…I forgot the stupid holiday season. Just shoot me now. I wanted to get a lot done tonight, but was stymied by pumpkin pie, whipped cream, a bad parking situation, and the girlchild locking her keys in her car…across town…by the time I got home around 7, I was completely braindead and so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. I managed to rally (two cups of tea later) and exercise and meditate and more importantly? I found, designed, and printed my Owl Lover 2014 calendar…if you go here, you can design your own. It’s a nice size for hanging by the computer if you’re a super visual person like me who needs to see the days laid out while I’m lesson planning or art planning or life planning. Plus owls. Arty owls. And you get to pick the 12 you like best. I’m currently looking at December for 2013, chosen in December of 2012, and wondering what the fuck I was thinking, but maybe that’s a learning experience. Anyway. Go make your own. Make one for everyone in the family. Laminate it. Hang it from your rearview mirror. Leave one in a public bathroom. Why not?
I am trying very hard to keep my head on straight. The counselor and I made a plan. Actually, she asked me how I keep my head together and I told her, and she sagely nodded her head and said I was doing all the right things.
OK then. I would like to spend more time hiking and exercising in the next week. I would like to read some more. I would like to be better organized (although holy god, my phone keeps me in check and tells me exactly what I’ve forgotten, usually 5 minutes after I should have remembered it, which is why my computer is still at school even though I need it at home tomorrow…whoops). But seriously, without the calendar, I’d be completely disorganized, instead of just minorly so…which is what I am now. I’d like the house to be cleaner (nice use of passive voice, Kathryn, like someone is gonna clean it for you). Girlchild did help tonight with tree ornaments, but I think we are still only half done. Maybe that’s all it needs to be. I would like more sleep. That’s harder. I don’t seem to be able to rock that well.
I want to finish some drawings and some quilts and get into some shows. I want to mow the lawn. I want to sweep up the leaves. I want to take the cat to the vet to deal with her respiratory goo (I don’t really want to do that…but I need to). I want to clean the hallway carpet so it smells less like Babygirl’s experiments in traveling litterboxing and more like a hallway carpet. Or even a forest floor covered with leaves and fungi. That would be preferable. I want all my questions answered. I want a better camera. I want a road trip to somewhere I’ve never been. I want someone to help me figure out my computer backup system because the disk is full and I don’t know what to do now.
Meditation talks about looking at how we label other people as angry, happy, sad, mean, and how that is squeezing them into the box of our mental projection, instead of experiencing them as they are in the moment. I feel squeezed. Unsqueeze me. Let me the fuck out. Give me some space to…be. The counselor asked me if I remembered how I felt last holiday season…I told her I often reread blog posts from months in the past to figure out what issues I was having and to see if they repeat and to motivate myself to do better, do more (art mostly)…and that I had recently read December 2012 and realized I was happy. Content even. I was enjoying things…not everything…and certainly some things were irritating and stressful, but I didn’t even recognize the person writing. Because I’m not that person anymore and I never can be her again. I can just be like her, similar to her, maybe happy like her, but never her. I will always be her plus this cracked damage glued together and rebuilt to be happy in a different way. Hopefully a trusting way, but that seems hard to see at the moment. Right now it is sad and buried and cracked and damage. It is less so than a month ago, but it is still so.
No pictures tonight. I did no art. I was not productive. I just got through it. Still mourning a dog. Still hoping for better. Sleep calls. I listen and hope it lasts through the night this time.
Kathy Nida 